Saturday, October 12, 2013

I had little luck playing with the console one gets via Improvise (think: a terminal emulator in the browser), but it was cool nonetheless. The experience was much like loading the Minimal.db that comes with the original LambdaMOO server code: pretty much anything you type ends in a cryptic error.

Reading more documentation cleared things up a bit. I've half a notion to build out a personal website based off of Stunt and Improvise. My recent thinking is to plunge into the Indie Web movement a bit and run a personal site: first, as a WordPress site (just to get going) and then perhaps rolling my own CMS using Node.js or Django.

(The ideation phase is always the most fun, when all things are possible and sound really cool in your head).

But the possibly-meaningless thought of "making a personal web site that is programmable by any user" has the weird appeal of the pre-Cloud days of the Web, and even the weirdness of the pre-World Wide Web days of the Internet. (LambdaMOO was born roughly the same time as the web).

Well, much to think about. I'd like to see Stunt become widely available via various package management systems (Fedora, MacPorts, etc).

Oh, I should note here I've moved to Key West, Florida. This came about after, one day in May, I was looking at the classified ads in the online edition of The Citizen, Key West's local paper. There was a job listed in Help Wanted that was perfect for my wife: Director of Development for the Key West Art and Historical Society. I teasingly sent the ad to her, she applied for it just to show me up, and landed the job. So in short order we moved from Las Vegas to Key West.

This spells the end of my technology-scene-building days for a while. Vegas was a tabula rasa as far as tech scenes go, so I plunged myself into every tech Meetup there was and started one of my own (Las Vegas Developers Meetup, for any software developer regardless of technology). I also cofounded the first Vegas GiveCamp, a weekend hackathon for charity.

But since at least the middle of this year I've longed to get back into open source development. Probably longer. I think the free time is now there to finally finish work on Automake and roll some Linux distro packages.